Bush has failed

[CapTVK]

Originally posted by lightblue


Short summary. Hurricane hit Biloxi rather New orleans dead on, however storm surge (rain water and whipped up water) caused levee breaks in new Orleans causing large swathes of the city to be flooded by 6-20ft of water. More people than originally thought did not evacuate and rescue was quite slow so death toll is rising.

Although I have to add that the US coastguard was right on it from day 1. They rescued a lot of people from flooded homes in the past week.

[Barnabas]

thanks for the info.

so sad, poor people

what will they do with the people? move them to another city?

[lightblue]

They say the city will unhabitable in large parts for 12-16 weeks as it will take that long to drain the water and restore water/power. I guess the aprts worst affected (ie total destruction of property) will take a lot longer to become livable again. A significant amount of people will probably never go back to new orleans. Atm they're brought under in sports stadiums, hotels, military bases and the like. Basically the US has 1M+ internal refugees.

[Bereta_Eder]

why almost all of the flood strikken people are black?

[lightblue]

Because 65% of the population of New Orleans was black to start with. And they were the least likely to evacuate because a lot don't own transport.

[chequita guevara]

Large parts of the region are going to be unihabitable for longer than that. Most of the buildings that have been flooded will need to be torn down and rebuilt. People can't live in those things, with all the chemicals and mold that's building up in them.

[Koyaanisqatsi]

Speaking of chemicals and stuff...

I know the first priority is to pump out the city, and so we can't be all that discriminating, but has there been any commentary on what we're doing to the Mississippi and the gulf by dumping all this contaminated water into the region?

[DanS]

I think the concentrations of chemicals are such that pumping it out will not cause undue damage to the environment. Even the concentrations of chemicals in the flooded areas of New Orleans probably aren't that bad.

[lightblue]

Slight change of tack but i just watched the BBC 10 o'clock news. Was very moving some of the reports. The reporter went around in a little boat to some of the areas that hadn't seen any help yet. He picked up 5 kids in one house whose mother had died 3 days ago in the house due to lack of an oxygen tank (if i understood it correctly). They'd been in the house with their dead mother ever since. Was quite heart wrenching. Also the two middle aged brothers who wouldn't evacuate because they had the body of their mother in their house who died because she could not swim.

Pictures of bodies floating in the water and lying on the street, it was not a pretty sight, not dissimilar to some of the images from Banda Aceh or Sri Lanka 9 months ago.

[Sava]

September 5, 2005
A Failure of Leadership
By BOB HERBERT

"Bush to New Orleans: Drop Dead"

Neither the death of the chief justice nor the frantic efforts of panicked White House political advisers can conceal the magnitude of the president's failure of leadership last week. The catastrophe in New Orleans billowed up like the howling winds of hell and was carried live and in color on television screens across the U.S. and around the world.

The Big Easy had turned into the Big Hurt, and the colossal failure of George W. Bush to intervene powerfully and immediately to rescue tens of thousands of American citizens who were suffering horribly and dying in agony was there for all the world to see.

Hospitals with deathly ill patients were left without power, with ventilators that didn't work, with floodwaters rising on the lower floors and with corpses rotting in the corridors and stairwells. People unable to breathe on their own, or with cancer or heart disease or kidney failure, slipped into comas and sank into their final sleep in front of helpless doctors and relatives. These were Americans in desperate trouble.

The president didn't seem to notice.

Death and the stink of decay were all over the city. Corpses were propped up in wheelchairs and on lawn furniture, or left to decompose on sunbaked sidewalks. Some floated by in water fouled by human feces.

Degenerates roamed the city, shooting at rescue workers, beating and robbing distraught residents and tourists, raping women and girls. The president of the richest, most powerful country in the history of the world didn't seem to notice.

Viewers could watch diabetics go into insulin shock on national television, and you could see babies with the pale, vacant look of hunger that we're more used to seeing in dispatches from the third world. You could see their mothers, dirty and hungry themselves, weeping.

Old, critically ill people were left to soil themselves and in some cases die like stray animals on the floor of an airport triage center. For days the president of the United States didn't seem to notice.

He would have noticed if the majority of these stricken folks had been white and prosperous. But they weren't. Most were black and poor, and thus, to the George W. Bush administration, still invisible.

After days of withering criticism from white and black Americans, from conservatives as well as liberals, from Republicans and Democrats, the president finally felt compelled to act, however feebly. (The chorus of criticism from nearly all quarters demanding that the president do something tells me that the nation as a whole is so much better than this administration.)

Mr. Bush flew south on Friday and proved (as if more proof were needed) that he didn't get it. Instead of urgently focusing on the people who were stranded, hungry, sick and dying, he engaged in small talk, reminiscing at one point about the days when he used to party in New Orleans, and mentioning that Trent Lott had lost one of his houses but that it would be replaced with "a fantastic house - and I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

Mr. Bush's performance last week will rank as one of the worst ever by a president during a dire national emergency. What we witnessed, as clearly as the overwhelming agony of the city of New Orleans, was the dangerous incompetence and the staggering indifference to human suffering of the president and his administration.

And it is this incompetence and indifference to suffering (yes, the carnage continues to mount in Iraq) that makes it so hard to be optimistic about the prospects for the United States over the next few years. At a time when effective, innovative leadership is desperately needed to cope with matters of war and peace, terrorism and domestic security, the economic imperatives of globalization and the rising competition for oil, the United States is being led by a man who seems oblivious to the reality of his awesome responsibilities.

Like a boy being prepped for a second crack at a failed exam, Mr. Bush has been meeting with his handlers to see what steps can be taken to minimize the political fallout from this latest demonstration of his ineptitude. But this is not about politics. It's about competence. And when the president is so obviously clueless about matters so obviously important, it means that the rest of us, like the people left stranded in New Orleans, are in deep, deep trouble.

E-mail: bobherb@nytimes.com

link: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/09/05/op...rticle_popular

Couldn't have said it better myself.

[Winston]

After having once again skimmed this entire thread, I move for it to eventually be archived as the ultimate prime example of clueless anti-"the man" circle-jerking.

I'd puke my guts out over it if I were actually one of the people affected on a personal level by the disaster.

You guys are just incredible, you've really gone over the top on this one.

[lightblue]

Ouch that's some vitriol pouring out. Guess he has a point, from what I've seen over the last 5 years or so Bush does not have any natural empathy at all. I guess he also suffers from having to follow Clinton in this respect, who could make disadvantaged people feel like they really mattered (whatever he mgiht have thought to himself, the man was a better actor).

[chequita guevara]

Originally posted by Winston
After having once again skimmed this entire thread, I move for it to eventually be archived as the ultimate prime example of clueless anti-"the man" circle-jerking.

You know, Winston, this is the second national emergency where the President disappeared and failed to lead. I think we have a right to be angry.

I'd puke my guts out over it if I were actually one of the people affected on a personal level by the disaster.

Probably from catching dysantary while you were left to fend for yourself.

You guys are just incredible, you've really gone over the top on this one.

He's our President, not yours. We have every right to be going ape**** about what happened to our fellow Americans.

[chequita guevara]

I'll note two posts from Boris Gudanov in another thread.

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=3997466#post3997466

http://apolyton.net/forums/showthread.php?postid=3997512#post3997512

Nero fiddles while Rome burns and some barbarian admonishes us for being angry.

[The Emperor Fabulous]

Originally posted by Winston
After having once again skimmed this entire thread, I move for it to eventually be archived as the ultimate prime example of clueless anti-"the man" circle-jerking.

I'd puke my guts out over it if I were actually one of the people affected on a personal level by the disaster.

You guys are just incredible, you've really gone over the top on this one.

After having skimmed this entire thread, I have to say that I've seen a fair amount of dumb remarks by people on both sides of this issue (an issue we wouldn't be having, of course, had Bush done the job he was elected for.)

If Bush did it right, we wouldn't be having this discussion. He didn't, and so we are.

No one is blaming Bush for Katrina. We are angry at him, being our leader, for not leading. If Roosevelt had acted the way Bush has during Pearl Harbor, he would have been crucified.

If I were one of the victims, I would puke my guts out hearing you, a foreigner, say anything about fellow Americans lashing out at what they see went wrong. On some level, the poor leadership cost lives. Their lives. Their President let them down. My President let us down. Who are you to say anything?

After September 11th, it is obvious that Bush saw that he was falling heavily out of favor, listened to his advisors, and became the Cowboy that was going to destroy the badguys, and we rallied around him. However, that was when we were attacked by an enemy which caused the deaths of thousands of Americans. Now, ineptitude within our own nation has added to this horrible event.

He can try to become the rally point again, but it won't work. Bush will not have the same luck this time around.